Guest post by Brett Meyers, senior business analyst and ECM product lead, The Gordon Flesch Company.
In the wake of the recent Ashley Madison hacking scandal, cyber breaches have become a hot-button issue. Poking fun at high-profile people caught in the midst of a scandal has nearly become a national pastime in recent years, but the hack itself is no laughing matter. After all, just six months ago, a data breach at Anthem, Inc. revealed as many as 80 million records had been exposed during what the company characterized as a “very sophisticated external cyber attack.” Certainly, no one was laughing then – not the millions of people whose birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and income information were exposed — and certainly not Anthem, which now faces dozens of class action lawsuits. The costs may include millions of dollars in damages and a major hit to the insurance company’s brand and reputation.
One lesson these two very different breaches brought home is that businesses of every type and size are vulnerable to cyber attacks and identity theft. If Anthem were the only health-related business to have been hacked, it would still be a disturbing event; but in fact, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services maintains an entire website devoted to healthcare-related data breaches of 500 or more records. So far, there are more than 1,300 cases on file, with targets that include individual practices, university-based research facilities, public and private hospitals, and major insurance companies.
In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that 7 percent of the U.S. population 16 and older had been the victim of identity theft, and direct and indirect losses that year amounted to about $25 billion. That’s staggering. What’s even more alarming is that about one-third of those victims spent weeks or months trying to untangle the financial mess long after their information was stolen.
It’s easy to think the impact of identity theft is limited to financial implications, but the government report had one more startling bit of data revealing just how far-reaching the effects of a data breach can be on its victims. According to the data, “Victims who had personal information used to open a new account or for other fraudulent purposes were more likely than victims of existing account fraud to experience financial, credit and relationship problems and severe emotional distress.”
Healthchat is a communications platform that allows patients, physicians and medical staff to communicate and collaborate in a more efficient manner through the use of short videos sent through their mobile phones. This simple and secure application is available to physicians for a low monthly fee and free for patients and medical staff.
Elevator pitch
Healthchat is a HIPAA-compliant video-sharing app to connect healthcare providers and their patients – with speed and convenience.
Founders’ story
Chris Chowquan
Founder and CEO, Chris Chowquan, is an IT veteran, who has spent much of his career managing technology for healthcare payers. After many years of interfacing with physicians and patients he saw the need for a simpler, more efficient communications solution. Healthchat was founded in 2015.
Origin story
As a father and full-time employee who has to take time for doctor visits, he figured there must be a better way.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Healthchat’s sales team will be marketing to physicians directly. In addition, Healthchat will launch an integrated marketing campaign aimed at reaching all three groups who can benefit from this product: physicians, medical staff and patients.
Market opportunity
Despite mandates to improve the patient experience, accessing healthcare services remains highly inefficient. Healthchat addresses the problem – and stands alone as the only HIPAA-compliant, mobile-friendly communications platform for patients and their providers to connect about their healthcare.
Guest post by Terry Edwards, president and CEO, PerfectServe.
Terry Edwards
Each day, healthcare professionals need to communicate with colleagues, patients and others outside of their organization. These communications often contain critical information about dosage changes, requests for a consultation and other healthcare information that can have life-or-death consequences for patients.
From email and texting to calls and overhead pages, there are a dozen different ways healthcare professionals can communicate with one another. Many of these modes of communication are fairly new, and clinicians are still continuing to teach each other the rules of the road and associated etiquette.
But as healthcare transforms to be more focused on value-based care, it’s becoming even more important to get this right. To coordinate patient care across the patient’s entire journey within the health system, clinicians need to know how to reach each other in the best way. Although communication is an essential part of the job for clinicians, a recent survey of 955 healthcare professionals1 conducted online by Harris Poll and commissioned by PerfectServe, shows that clinicians aren’t always communicating in the way that they’d prefer.
Lessons learned:
Find a way to speak in person when possible: For complex or in-depth conversations within their organizations, healthcare professionals say they prefer to speak face-to-face (41 percent for physicians; 37 percent for non-physicians). This preference is particularly strong with nurses, with 55 percent of nurses surveyed saying their preferred method is face-to-face communication for complex or in-depth conversations with physician care team members. Speaking in person allows clinicians to focus on the conversation. Many of the clinicians I work with say taking time to speak in person gives them the opportunity to build a stronger rapport with their colleagues, which can make it easier to foster care coordination.
Think before picking up the phone: Phone calls are by far the most frequent form of communication with care team members outside their organization. More than half (55 percent) of clinicians say they most frequently use a phone call to connect with physician care team members outside of their organizations, and 48 percent most frequently use the phone to communicate with non-physician care team members outside of their organization. But while everyone is picking up the phone, only about a quarter of clinicians actually prefer phone calls for that kind of information sharing (29 percent for brief communications with physician care team members outside of their organization; 25 percent for outside non-physician members). In my work with clinicians, many say that the ring of the phone is an interruption to their work, and more than two-thirds (67 percent) of clinicians reported that they often receive pages or calls that are of low priority, which disrupts patient care.
Guest post by Will Hayles, technical writer and blogger, Outscale.
Will Hayles
Last year, 2014, was the year the wearables market really took off. No end of wearable technologies were released, each promising to hook users into the personal analytics and quantified self trends. Of course, many of those releases went nowhere, and even some of the big companies saw their wearable devices fizzle rather than pop — the obvious example being Google Glass, which received an unprecedented amount of attention, much of which was negative. But there were many successes, and later this year Apple will be entering the fray with the Apple Watch and its bundle of sensors.
Last year the wearables industry was worth around $2.8 billion. Over the next five years it’s expected be to worth more than $8.3 billion. But there is a market with the potential to dwarf the consumer fitness monitoring market, and that’s chronic illness management, which has, unfortunately, if understandably, seen far less attention from startups. As J.C. Herz notes in a Wired article on the subject, the entire market for fitness trackers is vastly outstripped by the size of the market for blood glucose test strips, which are an essential tool in the monitoring of diabetes.
Herz takes a harsh tone with an industry that has failed to focus research and development on solutions for people who stand to benefit the most, but I’m more optimistic. Healthcare outside of the fitness sphere is a difficult market, with a heavy — and necessary — regulatory burden and entrenched ideas about treatment and patient monitoring. Unity Stoakes, co-founder of StartUp Health, recognizes both the challenges and the potential for innovation that can significantly improve people’s lives:
“Unlike other industries, healthcare is plagued by regulation and longer product development timelines. Bringing successful products to market is challenging for both large industry players and digital health entrepreneurs. Startups need access to advisors, peers and dollars, while large companies need ‘batteries included’ entrepreneurs fueling innovation. The unprecedented level of change gripping the healthcare industry today presents both challenges and opportunities for both.”
There is recognition both within the healthcare industry and among technology companies that monitoring tools and other applications of wearable and mobile technology offer an opportunity to substantially change healthcare and the lives of people who suffer with chronic illnesses.
According to a recent study from the Health Research Industry, 42 percent of healthcare providers are comfortable relying on at-home test results for prescriptions. Sixty-six percent thought mobile solutions have the potential to help with the management of chronic diseases. And as we’ve discussed on this blog several times before, mobile technology and wearables are helping caregivers better collaborate and coordinate care.
Physicians can now get reimbursed for the coordination effort that is involved in managing a patient following a hospital discharge. ACT.md’s TCM-specific Health ACT Sets facilitate a structured, standardized, and proven process for optimal care coordination to reduce hospital re-admissions and support TCM billing. The ACT Sets are structured in a way for providers to assess complexity, complete care actions required by CMS, and follow specific time sensitive requirements for care delivery and billing. ACT.md takes the complexity out of the TCM Billing process and pays for itself within months.
Elevator pitch
ACT.md is the platform for team-based care. Care teams need a way to jointly manage medical conditions in concert with behavioral, social, and functional needs. With ACT.md’s high-tech, high-touch platform and project management-like approach, healthcare organizations can engage in collaborative care planning, efficiently manage in-between visit care, and make safe, reliable handoffs across the care continuum. Our customers have seen a 30 percent reduction in the time spent on care coordination activities and improved compliance to care plans through meaningful caregiver and patient engagement.
Product/service description
Through an elegant and intuitive cloud-based technology, the web-based solution connects all members of a dynamic care team, including the patient and their trusted caregivers. We enable our customers to efficiently develop, reliably execute, and securely communicate a patient-centered care plan across their teams. The technology is complimented with a flexible care coordination workforce service offering to ensure nothing falls through the cracks and clinicians are working at the top of their license.
Origin story
Ted Quinn
“At ACT.md we are patients, caregivers, physicians, nurses, public health professionals, engineers, and operational leaders. We have personally experienced the significant challenges associated with managing complex care and are working to make life better for patients and everyone supporting them,” said Ted Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder, ACT.md.
Founder’s story
The company was founded by Ted Quinn along with Ken Mandl, MD and Zak Kohane, MD, both nationally-renowned healthcare informatics experts. The company was incubated at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Innovation Lab.
“We were inspired to launch ACT.md after observing for decades the constant dropped handoffs across the various providers caring for patients. So we created ACT.md as an operating system for team-based care that drives action toward improved outcomes and reduced costs,” said Dr. Kenneth Mandl, co-founder, ACT.md, professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program.
Marketing/promotion strategy
Kenneth Mandl
Every healthcare entity is dealing with change management around care delivery and care coordination. We’re sharing our vision of team-based care and it is resonating with the market.
We’re proud to work with our world-renowned advisory board – including John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Troy Brennan, MD, CMO at CVS Caremark – who help us share our vision with the nation’s leading providers and payers.
Market opportunity
According to Frost & Sullivan, the care coordination software market is expected to grow at a 26.1 percent compound annual growth rate between 2015 and 2020.
How your company differentiates itself from the competition
EMR/EHR vendors are the incumbents in the market, but they are not designed to do this job. Up to 70 percent of provider/patient work is conducted in the informal region outside the EMR, especially work related to the coordination of care. We have heard directly from healthcare organizations we are working with that with the leading EMR there is no way to track the status of handoffs, connect with outside providers and family caregivers, and that they really need a Care Coordination Record. This is the job that ACT.md is being hired to do, and we are getting traction with large health systems across the country.
ACT.md shines in complex care settings. The company is focused on powering team-based care for high-risk, high-cost patients.
Beverly Glass Buchman, senior vice president of marketing, TouchCare.
Beverly Glass Buchman
Numerous studies show that patient involvement in their own healthcare leads to reduced costs and better outcomes. It is especially beneficial for managing chronic diseases, such as diabetes, asthma and heart disease, and it will become even more vital as the industry continues to move from volume-based care to a value-based care system.
Still, in a recent CommonWealth Fund study, 86 percent of providers said patient engagement has been challenging, specifically when it comes to adopting healthy behaviors and being compliant with treatment protocols and standard care recommendations. The challenge lies in continuing the doctor-patient conversation between office visits. Many physicians struggle to stay connected with patients and follow up between office visits, while balancing their ever-demanding schedules and precious time off.
Mobile technology can help. It can serve as a key component for improving engagement simply by adapting to a patient’s lifestyle. Nearly every American owns a smartphone today and daily usage time continues to skyrocket.
Look at the numbers for American smartphone usage:
64 percent own a smartphone (PewResearch Center)
3 hours each day using their smartphones (ExactTarget)
People download three apps per month on average (comScore)
57 percent of smartphone owners use apps every single day (comScore)
Leveraging text messages, digital portals, and telemedicine video consults can engage your patients between appointments in a way that’s both convenient and familiar. For example, a remote video appointment allows a physician to check in between office visits to ensure medication adherence, discuss recent test results or receive patient feedback to help in shared decision making as treatment progresses. And it can be as easy as Skype or Facetime.
Scheduled virtual video consults can provide valuable data that will help tailor delivery of care to improve outcomes, all while saving money for both the provider and the patient.
Health IT’s most pressing issues may be so prevalent that they can’t be contained to a single post, as is obvious here, the fourth installment in the series detailing some of the biggest IT issues. There are differing opinions as to what the most important issues are, but there are many clear and overwhelming problems for the sector. Data, security, interoperability and compliance are some of the more obvious, according to the following experts, but those are not all, as you likely know and we’ll continue to see.
Here, we continue to offer the perspective of some of healthcare’s insiders who offer their opinions on health IT’s greatest problems and where we should be spending a good deal, if not most, of our focus. If you’d like to read other installments in the series, go here: Health IT’s Most Pressing Issues, Health IT’s Most Pressing Issues (Part 2) and Health IT’s Most Pressing Issues (Part 3). Also, feel free to let us know if you agree with the following, or add what you think are some of the sector’s biggest boondoggles.
First and foremost, of all the issues facing healthcare technology, I believe the top issue is the interoperability (or lack thereof) of most electronic medical records systems. Interfacing systems from disparate vendors usually takes expensive custom development, but hopefully the push for free access to EMR/EHR APIs in Stage 3 of the Meaningful Use Incentive program will finally bring semantic interoperability to health IT.
Paul Cioni, senior vice president, Healthcare & Infor Solutions Sales, Velocity Technology Solutions The top issue facing healthcare CIOs is that there is simply too much for them to do, including major initiatives involving information security, patient confidentiality, and revenue cycle management and reimbursement. Most are focusing on what’s urgent, rather than on what’s important. All of these issues are not only competing for a CIO’s budget, but also for his/her time. With so many things on the “as soon as possible” priority list, healthcare CIOs barely have time to strategically plan. It’s difficult for CIOs to create a five-year plan for the organization’s IT when they’re trying to figure out the next five months. A disaster recovery plan, for example, may not get created when CIOs are more concerned with downtime of clinical applications or the reporting of a data breach to the regulatory authorities.
Paul Cioni
The use of the cloud — with a comprehensive but flexible portfolio of service options- helps relieve CIOs from what I call the “tyranny of the urgent.” By allowing a cloud provider to manage a variety of back-office and ERP-related functions, the CIO can shift his focus to systems that affect clinical outcomes. Extending the secure, private cloud approach to clinical systems liberates key resources — budget and people — to focus on achieving meaningful use or embracing population health initiatives. Cloud deployment options like disaster recovery as a service or desktop as a service can conserve capital dollars and speed time to outcome. It’s not one issue – it’s all of them.
Health IT’s most pressing issues may be so prevalent that they can’t be contained to a single post, as is obvious here, the third installment in the series detailing some of the biggest IT issues. There are differing opinions as to what the most important issues are, but there are many clear and overwhelming problems for the sector. Data, security, interoperability and compliance are some of the more obvious, according to the following experts, but those are not all, as you likely know and we’ll continue to see.
Here, we continue to offer the perspective of some of healthcare’s insiders who offer their opinions on health IT’s greatest problems and where we should be spending a good deal, if not most, of our focus. If you’d like to read the first installment in the series, go here: Health IT’s Most Pressing Issues and Health IT’s Most Pressing Issues (Part 2). Also, feel free to let us know if you agree with the following, or add what you think are some of the sector’s biggest boondoggles.
The healthcare industry has undoubtedly become a bigger target for security threats and data breaches in recent years and in my opinion that can be attributed in large part to the industry’s movement to virtualization and the cloud. By adopting these agile, effective and cost-effective modern technological trends, it also widens the network’s attack surface area, and in turn, raises the potential risk for security threats.
We actually conducted some research recently that addresses evolving security challenges, including those impacting the healthcare industry, with the introduction of cloud infrastructures. The issue is highlighted by the fact that the growing popularity of cloud adoption has been identified as one of the key reasons IT and security professionals (57 percent) find securing their networks more difficult today than two years ago.
Paul Brient
Paul Brient, CEO, PatientKeeper, Inc. No industry on Earth has computerized its operations with a goal to reduce productivity and efficiency. That would be absurd. Yet we see countless articles and complaints by physicians about the fact that computerization of their workflows has made them less productive, less efficient and potentially less effective. An EHR is supposed to “automate and streamline the clinician’s workflow.” But does it really? Unfortunately, no. At least not yet. Impediments to using hospital EHRs demand attention because physicians are by far the most expensive and limited resource in the healthcare system. Hopefully, the next few years will bring about the innovation and new approaches necessary to make EHRs truly work for physicians. Otherwise, the $36 billion and the countless hours hospitals across the country have spent implementing electronic systems will have been squandered.
Email security is one of healthcare’s top IT issues, thanks, in part, to budget constraints. Many healthcare organizations have already allocated the majority of IT dollars to improving systems that manage electronic patient records in order to meet HIPAA compliance. As such, data security may fall to the wayside, leaving sensitive customer information vulnerable to sophisticated cyber-attacks that combine social engineering and spear-phishing to penetrate organizations’ networks and steal critical data. Most of the major data breaches that have occurred over the past year have been initiated by this type of email-based threat. The only defense against this level of attack is a layered approach to security, which has evolved beyond traditional email security solutions that may have been adequate a few years ago, but are no longer a match for highly-targeted spear-phishing attacks.
Dr. Rae Hayward, HCISPP, director of education and training at (ISC)²
Dr. Rae Hayward
According to the 2015 (ISC)² Global Information Security Workforce Study, global healthcare industry professionals identified the following top security threats as the most concerning: malware (77 percent), application vulnerabilities (74 percent), configuration mistakes/oversights (70 percent), mobile devices (69 percent) and faulty network/system configuration (65 percent). Also, customer privacy violations, damage to the organization’s reputation and breach of laws and regulations were ranked equally as top priorities for healthcare IT security professionals.
So what do these professionals believe will help to resolve these issues? Healthcare respondents believe that network monitoring and intelligence (76 percent), along with improved intrusion detection and prevention technologies (73 percent) are security technologies that will provide significant improvements to the security posture of their organizations. Other research shows that having a business continuity management plan involved in remediation efforts will help to reduce the costs associated with a breach. Having a formal incident response plan in place prior to any incident decreases the average cost of the data breach. A strong security posture decreases not only incidents, but also the loss of data when a breach occurs.
